FYODOR’S DIET

Many tools keep growing with each new version, but Nmap 4.00 has lost weight thanks to the Diet-Nmap project. The latest incarnation of Nmap is not only quicker, it is also more frugal with memory.

The Network Mapper tool, or Nmap [1], is my constant companion. Just recently, Nmap inventor Fyodor celebrated his brainchild’s eighth birhtday, and the birthday present was a new diet of code with many useful new functions. One of the most exciting introductions is the addition of ARP scanning. The operating system uses ARP requests to query MAC addresses on the target network. Nmap simply takes over this chore for the operating system, and as a result, the Nmap scanner generates a useful collection of reliable data on the number and type of active hosts on the network.

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